<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Do you put the names and amounts on a piece of paper and put it in a bucket <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Wow, I've never seen a silent auction run this way. Part of the fun I have at a silent auction is watching (and a few times participating in) two or three people going back to the same item to raise their bids again. I'd be interested in hearing from anybody who does do it that way, and hearing how well it works.
If you are also having a live auction, you might consider having a provision for transferring the popular items from silent to live. Somebody ends up upset if the winning bid becomes a matter of being the last person with the pencil in their hand. If you've got multiple people still interested, how high will it go if you don't cut off bidding?
My wife runs a silent auction on the 4th of July. She has three tables: red, white and blue, and they close at hour intervals. She publishes a booklet with a description of every item, and also the bidding rules. Some items may have a minimum bid, but the only increment rule is even dollars only. If the winning bid is a partial dollar, we round it up -- if the buyer objects, we offer to rescind their bid and sell it to the next lowest bidder.
We also have bidders sign up with the auction clerk, who makes sure we have all necessary contact information and assigns them a bidder number. Our bid sheets have a column for bidder number, bidder name and bid amount. We print them on two-part carbonless forms, and when we close the table we pull the top copy for the clerk and leave the bottom copy behind.
Be on the lookout for people who scratch out their old bid and write in a new one, rather than fill in a new line. This results in the highest bid not being the last one on the sheet, and the next bidder may not realize it. Auction workers look for those, correct them, and if they can identify the culprit will ask them not to do so in the future. The auction rules clearly state that the decisions of the auction clerk regarding winners are final, and if the clerk misses a higher bid out of place then everybody has to live with it.
With multiple tables, my wife tries to put identical items on separate tables. Missed out on the tickets on the red table? Try again on the white!
She will also put some similar items side-by-side. Given birdhouses decorated for KU and K-State, she put them next to each other, and then urged fans of each school to make their's sell higher than the other school.